Payton White, BS

Urban Health Today

Payton White, BS, a PhD student in neuroscience at the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience and a member of the Rutgers&rsquo; Aging and Brain Health Alliance, shares her insights on strategies to successfully engage African American communities to increase awareness of the increased risk for Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease in this population. The Aging and Brain Health Alliance seeks to expand the public&rsquo;s understanding of aging, brain health, and prevention of Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease through community-based initiatives.<a href="https://urbanhealthtoday.com/post/genetic-factors-alzheimers-disease-risk-african-americans">Hear more</a> from Payton White on unanswered questions related to disparities in Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease risk and about her work with the Aging and Brain Health Alliance.&ndash;<h3>How have you engaged the African American community in Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease risk reduction efforts?</h3>The best way to answer that question would be to kind of put things into perspective. We see these statistics (right?) that African Americans are twice as likely to get Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease. But when you actually go out into the community, and you go to these churches, and you go to the senior centers and these affordable housing senior homes, you can see that it actually is very relevant. It&rsquo;s very prevalent in our community. I once went to a church where there were at least 10 to 15 people who were caring for someone with Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease, had recently lost someone to Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease, or actually had Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease. And it was mind blowing.What I found was a lot of the problem in reducing risk in our community is that they [the community members] aren&rsquo;t aware of the information. They aren&rsquo;t aware of what the steps actually are. So to actually go out and be able to give them this information&mdash;everybody wants the information. They&rsquo;re very receptive to it. I&rsquo;m a firm believer that there&rsquo;s this myth that African Americans are really hard to recruit for research, and they&rsquo;re very hard to get through to. And the truth is they are not.I once went to a public housing site and I just asked, &ldquo;How many of you are aware of Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease research or knew any of this information before we got here?&rdquo; And almost nobody raised their hand.Knowledge is power is what I will say. And providing this knowledge in a really digestible way and helping our community really understand what&rsquo;s going on with this disease&mdash;because it&rsquo;s&nbsp; becoming a crisis now&mdash;what&rsquo;s going on with this disease and what steps that we can take to prevent it. A lot of people think it&rsquo;s nonpreventable. A lot of people don&rsquo;t know that while there are these nonmodifiable risk factors, like genetics and family history, a lot of the risk factors that cause&mdash;especially Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease later on in life&mdash;are modifiable. There are lifestyle changes that you can make. When you&rsquo;re actually able to speak to the community, you can help them understand how these things actually contribute. Because the actual lifestyle changes that you make are things that I&rsquo;m sure doctors tell their patients all the time, like exercise more and get good sleep and eat a healthy diet. But when you actually are able to explain to them how these things interact to increase your risk for a disease like Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease, that is so prevalent in our community, it really helps. And you see people come in.We see people join our study and they come in and they [are] like, &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m exercising more. I&rsquo;ve changed a lot of things.&rdquo; And you see improvement in their cognition and their overall quality of life. I feel like the impact of knowledge is a lot stronger than people think that it is.

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Payton White discusses successful strategies to help increase awareness of the increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease in African American adults.